Even tiny glasses are huge on my head.
Tortilla Casserole
I realize you might see this photo and think to yourself, “I will not make something that looks this unattractive.” You should, though. I made this casserole up myself–an original recipe!–and it’s loosely based on some enchiladas Mr. Pea has made a couple of times. The casserole features flour tortillas, sour cream, green tomatillo salsa, cheddar and spinach; those are must-haves, but from there it’s very flexible. It’s a little sloppy and a little messy but it’s insanely tasty.
Begin with four flour tortillas. Cut them into quarters, place them on a cookie sheet, and pop into your oven as you preheat it to 350. Turn them over once while you prep everything else, and keep an eye on them so they don’t burn. You just want them to crisp up a little so they don’t turn to mush later.
Take 1 chicken breast (this is tasty but not required–this could easily be vegetarian). Slice it in half so you have two thin fillets and cook them in olive oil over medium-high heat in a skillet. When it’s done, shred with two forks and resist eating all the crunchy outside bits.
While chicken cooks and tortillas brown, thaw a box of spinach in the microwave. Drain well. I added some frozen corn and beans that we had from a barbecue pizza last week. You could certainly add lots of those and skip the chicken.
Add two big spoonfulls of sour cream to the spinach (I was just using a big soup spoon and rounding well when I spooned the cream) and two big spoonfulls of salsa. Add about 1 c shredded cheddar. All of these things can be adjusted for taste and texture–you don’t want it too soupy, but you don’t want it too dry. Stir up.
Take your tortillas and place a layer on the bottom of a 9x 13 pan. Spoon half your spinach mixture on top. Add more tortillas, then more spinach, then a last layer of tortillas. In that bowl stir together a couple spoonfulls of sour cream (we used half a pint container–quart?–that medium-sized one at the store) and more salsa. We used half a jar of salsa from Whole Foods. It was only $2.69. I was impressed. Anyway, pour this mixture over the top of the dish and top with another cup of shredded cheese. Place on a foil-lined cookie sheet in case of spillage. Bake for 25 minutes to a half an hour, and dig in. It’s comfort food with a little zing, a little tang, perfect for early spring.
What a turkey
I just realized this morning that I never fixed all the URLs in the recipe index when I migrated the site to wordpress. If you’d looked there for recipes you would have got all kinds of errors. It’s all fixed now, and I added the last six months of recipes to it.
Oatmeal Cookies
The other day I made these yummy oatmeal cookies. They’re pretty much the only thing I’ve made in several days as the crunch of the semester sets in. In addition to my load of four classes (all of whom had midterms and papers due right before break), I have 3 public presentations of my own to give, so I’ve been working on those when I’m not grading or prepping; I also have other extracurricular stuff coming up, such as reading student writing portfolios, preparing to teach a first-year seminar that comes with hours of training, and moving away from this apartment to another one. All of this makes me crazy, and hurts my resolve to cook more and eat out less. This past week we ate out on Wednesday to celebrate our good fortune (we found out that we got our garden plot and a new apartment in one day!), on Friday, Mr. Pea really wanted grinders for dinner, so the sauce I’d thawed from the freezer waited until Saturday. Then last night we realized that despite Mr. Pea having gone grocery shopping and a lighthearted promise we’d made to each other to not eat out for a whole week, every dinner possibility was either frozen or needed milk, which we didn’t have, so I picked up some Chinese food. There’s a pattern here, isn’t there…. at any rate, starting today, dammit, no take out or eating out for a whole darn week. Back on the wagon. At least when we’ve eaten out three (yipes) times this past week, we’ve spent less than many people I know on one night out 
You’ve probably noticed that with this drop in cooking came a corresponding drop in posting, and an utter abandonment of my photo every day project. Clearly I need to restart the ol’ engine.
Today, then, we are getting some milk, I’m making some granola, and I’ll remember to thaw out some chicken to make a tortilla casserole later on. I swear. Plus I’ll photograph at least dinner to post about and start taking photos of the day again. Promise. Once I recharge our lame camera batteries, anyway.
In the meantime, cookies! These are crunchy oatmeal cookies packed with fiber and tastiness. They taste buttery and delicious. I modified this recipe from one on recipezaar, and it makes about 24-30 cookies.
6 T butter, softened
1/2 c packed brown sugar (I use dark)
1/4 c white sugar
1/2 t baking powder
1/8 t baking soda
1/4 t cinnamon
tiny pinch ground cloves
1 egg
1/2 t vanilla
7 T wheat flour
7 T white flour
1 c rolled oats
1/2 c raisins
Begin by creaming the butter and sugars in a mixer on medium speed. Add cinnamon, cloves, baking soda and baking powder and mix well. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Make sure you scrape down the bowl to get the butter off the bottom. Beat in as much flour as you can and work the rest in, along with the oats and raisins, with a spatula or wooden spoon. Drop in rounded teaspoons on a cookie sheet at least an inch or so apart and bake 10-12 minutes at 375*.
One of the many things I’m excited about in our new apartment is an oven that hopefully keeps temperature. Ours is so erratic it’s a wonder I can bake at all. The new stove, though, is electric, which is a bummer. I’ve been spoiled by gas for 7 years now, so I’ll have to re-learn how to cook on an electric stove. But the new place also has a dishwasher, which brings me endless joy!
Woohoo!
Today I got up early (waaay early–cat’s fault) and eventually moseyed my way out the door to join the line forming at Westmoor Park to get our garden spot. The pickings were getting slim, but I got us a 20 x 20 foot space in the community garden. It’s at a corner–this has its pros and cons (easy to reach with hose; easy for others to trample with hoses) and might get a little shade, but I’m excited. I felt like I was investing myself in the community, trying to become a part of something I kind of resisted for a long while. There was about 15 people in line when I got there a half-hour before the doors opened; by the time I left at 10 past 9, there were a lot of people, most of whom I suspected would end up disappointed as the spaces disappeared. But oh boy! Now I can get a whole pile of seeds. We can’t get in until the end of next month as they clear the ground and till it, and I’ll be there at our first opportunity to start planting.
The park itself is really charming–it’s got animals, a little petting area, wide fields and woodsy hiking trails. I’m thrilled that we’ll get to spend a lot of time in the peacefulness of it.
Incidentally, in other very good news, we did some apartment hunting this past weekend and loved the first one we saw–we found out today that we got it. Hooooray! We will now have a dishwasher and non-coin-op washing machine!! Yay!
Name that scent!
I have a great big baking sheet that I love to use because it allows me to make more cookies at once. I made wonton skin crackers on it a month or two ago now, and I noticed that some of the crackers had a bit of a perfumey taste to them. Ew. So I washed the pan well and forgot about it. Next batch, same thing. Was it the skins? The veg oil? The pan? Who knows. I washed the pan well and forgot about it. Tonight, however, I made some oatmeal raisin cookies (I’ll tell you more about them tomorrow), and when I put the batch on that particular baking sheet in the oven, after about 6 minutes, I could actually smell that perfumey odor coming from the oven! I opened the door and could smell it pretty strongly! Then it disappeared, as though it cooked off, and the cookies from that sheet actually taste just fine. So what the hell is going on? Whatever was on there a month ago should have washed off by now; no other time I’ve used the oven have I smelled that, so it must be the cookie sheet. I sniffed a bunch of the cookies to make sure none of them had that perfume scent clinging to them. Perhaps when we use our handsoap in the sink, it clung to the bottom of the pan–that doesn’t get washed nearly as carefully as the top–and it cooked off, but left the cookies alone. That’s all I can figure. Your thoughts?
In other news, it does look like we are moving. I am excited about this and dreading it all at once. Somehow I slept through last night’s chaos which Mr. Pea reported involved two cars, one sounding like it hit the house next door. Sweeeeet. I won’t miss that at all. But packing? And lifting stuff? That I am less thrilled about.
White House Garden
I think this is pretty awesome…
DINING & WINE
Obamas to Plant White House Vegetable Garden
By MARIAN BURROS
Published: March 19, 2009
Michelle Obama is planning the first such garden since Eleanor Roosevelt’s victory garden in World War II.
Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/dining/19garden-web.html
Doing it (all) yourself
I am on spring break this week, and while that means I have time to tackle a mountain of grading, conference prep, and college service stuff, it also means I have the time to sit and think and daydream. My daydreaming lately has been about stuff I can make. I like to make stuff. I like to make stuff that people ordinarily get at stores. I like knowing where my stuff comes from and what it’s made of; I like sticking it to ‘the man’ a very little; and I like working with my hands. I think, though, that I’m heading into over-my-head territory and too-many-projects land at a rapid pace. I spent an hour or so the other day learning about soy candles and figuring out how one would make them, specifically scented with rosemary and lavender. It’d be cheaper than buying them and I’d get to make them! with my hands! When I told Mr. Pea my thoughts, he said “Can’t you just buy them? You’re going to have an awful lot of projects soon.”
I am also thinking about getting the hard cheese making kit from cheesemaking.com so I can make our cheddar and a range of other cheeses.
I saw a post on Angry Chicken today. I want to make butter, too, but that won’t be for a while, as we have two pounds in the fridge already.
I bookmarked a link on making your own hand scrubs from olive oil and lemon and an abrasive like sugar.
I still haven’t even started making my own produce and bulk bin bags, which I mentioned a few weeks ago.
At what point do I cut it off and say, that’s it! No more projects! Is that even necessary? If you ask Mr. Pea and the tower of craft supplies in the other room, I suspect the answer is yes, eventually so. But man, I really want to get some candle-making supplies….
Let it begin! Er, I got a few seeds.
Today we had ourselves a nice wild goose chase looking for seeds. I was hoping to get a seed tray to get these guys started, but alas, we couldn’t find one. We started at Home Depot-no seeds, no nothin’. We got these seeds are Target, but nothing else. Alas, they’ll just have to wait.
We’re starting with just some herb seeds. Here I have cilantro, parsley, garlic chives, and sage. They’ll be interspersed with other plants in our theoretical garden, as some herbs–including basil, seeds of which I already have–have fine soil-boosting and insect-fighting properties, so long as they’re near plants they like. I worked on a draft of a garden plan today. I forgot green beans, but other than that, it looks pretty good. We’ll see how (if) it looks on paper. Wednesday is ‘get-yer-plot’ day. So we’ll know then.
In other news, we’re planning on moving. Our apartment is lovely, but the neighborhood is not. If we liked people rapping next door at 4 am, having loud cell phone conversations outside your window at 3 am, or feeling like we’re going to get mugged periodically if we walk in a particular direction down the street, we’d stay. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. So I think we’ll be going. Some of you might remember how much I hate, hate moving. But I like feeling secure more than I hate moving, so that’s the verdict. It’s a shame, but it’s the way it is. And I’m hoping for an upstairs apartment or a side-by-side duplex so the, um, vocalizations from above aren’t something we need to tolerate.
